In this era of "fake news", belief in conspiracy theories is becoming a daily occurrence. Some people usually brush them off - they find them overly simplistic, biased or far-fetched, but others believe. And if a person believes in one of the conspiracy theories, they usually believe in others.
Psychologists are very interested in why some people tend to believe conspiracy theories, especially because the consequences can be harmful: for example, they avoid vaccinating their children because they believe that vaccinations can harm public health. In other cases, belief in a conspiracy against one's ethnic or religious group can trigger radicalism.
One of the main differences between conspiracy advocates and non-believers is that non-believers tend to be more educated. For a new study in applied cognitive psychology, Jan-Willem Van Prooyen of VU Amsterdam conducted two large surveys to try to understand what it means to be more educated, because it seems to be an inoculation against conspiracy belief.
In his survey, Van Prooyen collected over 4,000 readers of a popular science journal in the Netherlands with an average age of 32. He asked them about their level of formal education and about their belief in various well-known conspiracy theories, such as that the moon landing was a hoax. He tested their sense of powerlessness, their subjective sense of their social class, and their belief in simple solutions, such as "most problems in society are easy to solve."
The more educated the participant was, the less likely they were to support conspiracy theories.
Yai Evgeniya